The Paris Olympics have arrived.

I'm Neil Patterson. Welcome to the Daily.

And ordinarily, at this point, we'd all be looking forward to the opening ceremony

and the games getting started properly.

Instead, a series of arson attacks have brought the French railway network to its knees.

It's probably a large-scale sabotage with some malicious acts, probably.

Our Europe correspondent is Adam Parsons.

He's out in Paris where I suppose people are perhaps not quite as excited as they might have been.

What do we know about these so-called arson attacks?

So what we know is that there were a series of attacks on the railway network. Now, in some ways,

Neil, what we know is irritatingly vague because we don't have the specifics that we'd have

wanted. We've seen images of cables that have been

damaged. But these are in various locations, not here in Paris, but the high-speed lines that go

out towards the Atlantic coast and then towards the northeast and the northwest. We know that

there was another attack that was foiled in the southeast when railway

workers saw people acting suspiciously. So we know that this damage was done to their network.

We know that it has caused a huge amount of disruption with hundreds of thousands of people

having their journeys disrupted. But I think crucially, we also know that the French government is treating this as coordinated

sabotage. This is somebody who is clearly trying to disrupt these Olympics. And let's be blunt,

it's not easy. Carrying out these sort of coordinated attacks is not an easy task.

It certainly isn't, and it speaks to the sophistication of whoever ultimately was behind this.

But whilst they're being described in terms of an arson attack, malicious acts of vandalism,

...